First of the Merrie Melodies. Well made, anarchic, extending anthropomorphization to the entire building that forms most of the set, and showing alcohol-induced psychosis for comedy. It introduced Foxy, a copy of Mickey Mouse, and Roxy, who combines Betty Boop (launched a year earlier; her vocal flourishes are imitated here) with the redundant markers of femininity that are also applied to Bosko’s girlfriend Honey. The attempt to promote a Warner-owned popular song is more obvious than in the earlier Looney Tunes (1930).

Amid violence and urban alienation, it achieves the distinction of being especially nonsensical because the music it promotes is very poorly matched to the action. Perhaps it could be profitably remixed to Daft Punk’s song by the same name.

More hobos, and an amusing advertisement for asbestos on the theater curtain, deliberately comical in the era of escalating concern with the negative health effects. There’s good anarchic energy in a few shots, but the nightmare scene doesn’t quite sustain the right intensity.

More hobos, and Uncle Tom; one of the Censored Eleven for its obvious racism. I like the lights from the windows on the boat reflected in the water, Porky’s trick with the propeller, the third-act ripoff of “The Skeleton Dance” (1929), and the extreme (though not graphic) brutality of the melodramatic villain’s comeuppance.

I initially thought it might be Christopher Columbus in the title, but it really is Russ Columbo, even though the characters are racially caricatured in a 15th-century lifestyle. I suppose the most interesting thing about this short is the relative similarity of the girl and the boy, compared to the previous couples in this series and Looney Tunes (1930): The extreme feminine attributes of Honey, Roxy and Fluffy are absent here.

One good detail for ecocriticism: A waiter orders “One soup!” from a plucked chicken in the kitchen. The bird replies “Comin' up!”, leaps from its shelf into a bowl of water on the stove, swims around, rubs its butt in the water a little extra before getting out, and then towels off. The waiter returns and takes a scoop of water from the bowl to serve his customer. Compare “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!” (1931). The scene of the psychotic, drunken horse is repeated from “Lady, Play Your Mandolin!” (1931), but the wild energy of that film is sadly absent here.

Mice defend themselves from a cat using musical instruments, in what appears to be a school.

Commentary

First Warner Bros. Oscar nomination for an animated short. It’s plain to see why: It’s much more European and poetic in its sensibilities than other early Merrie Melodies shorts, and much more sedate. The shot of the cat creeping across the roof in the rain is actually beautiful.

The atypically realistic character designs for Cleopatra and Tarzan look out of place. The design for Edward Hyde prefigures Kevin O’Neill’s rendition of the character in Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999). Indeed, Hyde here functions as a villain against the characters from other works.

Sambo and Uncle Tom are both present as literary classics, as would be expected from early Merrie Melodies; they’re the only ones present that would completely drop out of the canon in the 85 years between the production and my viewing. Unexpectedly, Hyde does not morph into a black stereotype like them after being splashed with ink.

Musical pastiche of American stereotypes of East Asian culture: Mostly Chinese but with Japanese torii and stratovolcano etc.

Commentary

No improvement over “The Dragon Painter” (1919). The title song is delivered in broken English. As usual, the WB animation studio likes to mix its racial stereotypes for variety, so there’s a Mandarin version of Amos and Andy in one shot.

The usual casual racism and exoticism dressed up for comedy. The comment on Rasputin is curious in its lack of apparent meaning. He’s just a scheming villain, disloyal to an unseen tzar. He’s not even hard to kill. The amusing figure entering his castle with a bunch of bombs—perhaps a 1910s-style anarchist terrorist vaguely influenced by Khioniya Guseva—is dropped without comment or consequence.

I like the many-eyed anthropomorphic potato crying, the anthropomorphic egg slipping in lard to fall and crack open, revealing an unharmed anthropomorphic chicken, and finally the literal doughboy who gets doped up on yeast and cooked by his enemies. The egg and the doughboy exhibit the kind of queasily comic cartoon mortality you might see in Rick and Morty (2013).

I was reminded of my niece’s 2017 fascination with “Shopkins”, little anthropomorphic representations of consumer goods, a more recent form of imagining inanimate objects of desire as friendly creatures.

Catchy. The funniest thing about it is the deliberately broken coy causality. Observe the cut away from the shot of the thermometer, starting with a heart-shaped red bead of mercury and rising to indicate that the honeymooners are schtupping. High pressure breaks the glass (orgasm) and triggers the fire alarm. In isolation, that’s expected in the genre, but it becomes apparent that the same event somehow caused an actual fire too, which is not actually shown and upon which there is no comment whatsoever.

An imp and a cherub get into a brutal fistfight and leave the protagonist to drink his gin. He goes to a casino-themed Heaven where everyone is black. Saint Peter gets rid of a salesman at the gate.

Commentary

There is no implication that whites go to a segregated Heaven elsewhere. As a satire of Christian belief it’s pretty funny. It would have been less funny with a white Saint Peter, and funnier without the racial stereotypes.

A poor girl, possibly an orphan, freezes in the winter. When she falls asleep, toys come by to give her an extreme home makeover. Unlike “Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule” (1934), there is nothing here to indicate that the fantastic event is only a dream.

Commentary

Colour. It is a curious reversal of the several previous Merrie Melodies where toys party by themselves. See it for the implication that what destitute children need is the appearance of a middle-class lifestyle, not attentive parents, friends, money, education, talent, effort etc.

The sole highlight is the rhyming conversation between bad-boy Peter Rabbit—whether licensed or a knock-off I don’t know—and his classmates, who warn him not to steal from the farmer, because the teacher will find out. Also, the farmer is a human who will kill Peter and eat him “in a pot”; I like how the funny-animal setting makes this bogeyman threat uncommonly credible. The speaking, anthropomorphic prey animals wear (some) clothes, unlike the farmer’s mute cow.

An awkward combination of several of Freleng’s most common tropes: Musical bugs repurposing a domestic scene in the absence of people, melodramatic villainy threatening the women, and gentle, conventionally moral parody of a pop star.

The final shot, of non-funny-animal cocks on the bleachers when their funny-animal owners and trainers fight, is no punchline. It is more interesting, ecocritically, that the two feuding hillbilly clans are both represented as biologically similar to one another and internally diverse.

Cartoon caricatures of real contemporary celebrities at a glamorous night club, patterned after the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Commentary

Wikipedia names over 20 celebrities, many more than I could recognize. For something so extremely heavy on reference humour for its time and medium, it is surprisingly well put together; there is even a restored version where the colour looks lovely. Though it alludes to the various celebrities rather than naming them, it is a more direct form of reference humour than the mere idioms of “Bosko in Person” (1933).

As in “Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid” (1929), there is not much going on here except ethnicity viewed from the outside. Like Bosko, the Americans dance the czardas to mix things up. The individual jokes all fail, which leads me to believe that this game of etnicities was itself considered a selling point.